When I first came up, I lodged at the house of an old gentleman in Woburn Place, Russell Square. He was a typical Londoner, and he followed a calling of which, I should imagine, he must have been the very last professor. He was a painter of hatchments. In those days the death of a member of the aristocracy was indicated by the appearance on the house-front of a canvas bearing a representation of the armorial bearings of the deceased. This work of art was usually fixed between the windows of the first-floor. These grim heraldic emblazonments were at one time exhibited in considerable profusion in the streets and squares of the West End. The custom seems to have “gone out.” So many swells now live in flats, where the exhibition of such mural decoration might be misunderstood and resented, that the grisly custom has grown into desuetude. My landlord was the last of the hatchment painters. He was a little man close upon seventy years of age. He was extremely good-looking, had small side-whiskers and a tiny imperial, both snow-white. The rest of his face was clean-chaven. His salient physical peculiarity was a pink and white complexion which have been the despair and envy of his aristocratic patrons. He was a brisk, cheery mortal wonderfully quick in his movements. For the rest, he loved the London in which he had been born, and from which he had never wandered much farther than Hampton Court; he had a fund of information about the houses of Mayfair and Bloomsbury; he was a determined playgoer; he had an acquaintanceship with some actors and actresses, and was on particularly friendly terms with Charles Mathews. Naturally, he was a wellspring of gossip regarding the noble families with whom his melancholy art made him acquainted.